Brief:Interpersonal Campus Security (ICS) is a multi-phased proprietary app concept and prototype co-developed by myself with guidance from UArts professor Slavko Milekic, M.D., PhD; spanning almost a year of research and development. It is based off a prior app concept and system of mine, Philly Date Safety (PDS).

The intent of ICS is to specifically to act as a students backup-plan should they be assaulted while commuting to and from school in an urban environment.

This works by gathering the users GPS locations at timed intervals and calculating an ETA when traveling (home or school) with added conditional backups. An intelligent countdown timer with a very clever algorithm, for the less technical minded reading this.

I promise a new, more digestible UML will be posted, someday.

System:While the system of ICS is highly complex, the app itself can fun in a nearly near full autonomous manor; seldom needing user input. This was devised because should the user come under attack, the chances of them able to use their cell phone significantly drop, thus dialing 911 becomes moot during of after the incident; assuming they still can. A huge assumption I didn't bet on.

The system would thusly be pre-populated via user setup or auto-gather the following information such as:

How are you commuting (walking, biking, subway, bus) ?

Where exactly is your class taking place (actual building) and floor?

What is the last 24 hours of crime statistics within your home and campus?

What are the current traffic reports or are any of the subways you may use under construction?

What is the current weather condition?

What are the visibility conditions?

What temperature is it outside?

What time is it?

What is your fitness level (likely walking speed) ?

All of these and more added together become a very large and complex algorithmic process that can auto-adjust your ETA, thus the hands-free design.

Redundancy:Of-course any system designer worth their weight knows how important redundancy is and ICS had them baked in from the start.

The first backup would be what I dubbed "Designated Buddys" (D-Buddy) a play off Designated Driver, or simply family or friends that could quickly come to your aid in the event an emergency alert had been sent. Emphasis in choosing locals so that they could come to your aid faster then say, family living states away. 3 Such D-Buddy's would be asked when you registered with the app. If the first doesn't reply to the automated distress text alert, #2 gets the alert, then #3 and so on. All of this would happen very quickly to determine if ICS should proceed to redundancy two.

The second backup would be the most local police/fire/campus security department(s). So rather than an e-911 that could be routed to any number of agencies, the app would updated to the most local department dependent on location and then send an alert. This would contain an interactive XML of the last 24 hours of GPS locations to help find your location, in the event your not where your phone currently is or your phone was destroyed.

Naturally the possibility of "wolf cries" are likely, however as I have yet devised a way to prevent this, I chosen to take the "better safe then sorry" motto for now.

User Interface:Because ICS is the spiritual successor of Philly Date Safety, it's interface is extremely similar. The most notable difference however is how much less the entire interface was from PDS due to ICS's automation. This such design trumps the need for any slick interface we so often read of from Clear to Flipboard. While playful and gesture based interfaces are great, what is better is one that need never be interacted with such as the system behind Samsung Galaxy's Phone eye tracking interfaces.

Inspite of this, I designed will over 200 interfaces; tweaking typography, layout, shape, navigation and more. The central focus of all these was the psychological subconscious process of the interface; what the user thinks, feels and it's usability to understand. And what did I learn in the end? Less is oh so much more.

Marketing:ICS was not without it's long term financing and sales plan (MVP) and I has spent the majority of summer 2013 developing the keynote presentation to help market the idea for further investment with professor Milekic's connections.

The core of the app would always remain free for use and because of its automated nature, ad's where moot. However during my research and sales planning I did notice in my research the need for some type of fee to maintain the server, cost for software licenses and whatever bug fixing I would have to tackle at a later time. I did however choose to never resell user data as I find this practice reprehensible and destroys what little trust the end-user has left in the developers e.g. Facebook's Beacon and NSA involvement.

It's foremost income would be generated via one-time paid ‘add-ons’ that would be available should the user wish for additional functionality to the app. This would remove the horrible user experience of forcing users to buy bundled packages they may only use 1/10th of e.g. cable television, while at the same time generating faster income e.g. micro-transactions.

The Future Of ICS:The future of ICS is an uncertain one. During the development of ICS I hit a major derailment in my release timeline due to an unforeseen and an extremely painful surgery that caused me take an entire off semester to recover. And then my subsequent summer used to makeup all the homework I missed.

Now into the spring 2014 semester I lack any further time to develop this as well I have begun a larger, more grand project that has yet to cause any burnout; a plus for any artist. Would I love to finish this project, yes. Do I think someone else will make it happen regardless, highly likely.

In the end I didn't do this for fame or fortune, but to simply solve a problem. Nothing less and nothing more.

Thank you to BTC Marketing & UArts for not faulting me on my sudden absence from work & school. Also mad thanks to the dev's at Blimp for giving me free access to their Project Management Software to keep the entire project organized and shareable with others.